Marvel’s Jessica Jones S02 Review

After last season’s encounter with Purple Man, Jessica Jones has returned to her normal life, but Trish Walker (of It’s Patsy fame) has decided that Jessica needs to investigate her past some more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSvnepZS26s

Marvel’s Jessica Jones

Showrunner: Melissa Rosenberg

Cast:

Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones
Rachael Taylor as Trish Walker
Eka Darville as Malcolm Ducasse
J.R. Ramirez as Oscar Arocho
Terry Chen as Pryce Cheng
Carrie-Anne Moss as Jeri Hogarth
Callum Keith Rennie as Dr. Karl Malus
Janet McTeer as Alisa Jones

Premise:

Drowning in anger, Jessica Jones is forced to reckon with her past, her powers and her newfound fame as she dishes out her own messy form of justice. Finally ready to face her past, Jessica hunts down the source of her powers and uncovers a link to a shadowy killer who’s terrorizing the city.   (From Trakt.)

High Point:

I want to be vague so as not to spoil it, but episode 11 with the return of David Tennant was a great look into Jessica’s mind and her vulnerabilities and how she works through them.

All of the side characters are given a good story arc as well and feel very real.

Low Point:

A few characters feel under-utilized, and sometimes it feels less like the story is moving forward and is just treading water.

The Scores:

Originality: 4/6 There is a lot we’ve seen before, but it was an interesting take on the relationships within some familiar monster/detective/superhero stories.

Effects: 5/6 I can’t think of much that didn’t look like a real world event, but asides from leaping tall fences and throwing people across rooms, there wasn’t a call for many fancy effects.

Acting: 6/6 The acting was amazing.  I hadn’t realized how much was acting and how much was just her personality.  After seeing a smiling Kristen Ritter in a ponytail talking about she makes knitting kits, I realized how different she and Jessica actually are.  Carrie-Anne Moss was a stand-out as well, acting like a perfect letch.

Production: 6/6 The quality of the non-verbal storytelling was high.  A color shift in the lighting could tell you who had entered the room before the characters react.  A new dress is enough to show changes to a character.

Story: 5/6  The story is amazing.  It takes a bit longer to tell the story than necessary, but each character that makes my cast list above shows growth and change from the beginning of the story to the end.

Emotional Response: 5/6 I felt for each character, and while some decisions are clearly wrong, I understood why each character felt they had to make them.

Overall: 5/6  While not quite as powerful as the first season, the season gives us a strong trip into some strong characters.

In total, “Marvel’s Jessica Jones” Season 2 receives 36/42

11 replies on “Marvel’s Jessica Jones S02 Review”

  1. I quite enjoyed the fact that they resisted the temptation to have characters do things that were totally out of character just because plot. Or at least I didn’t notice any obviously out of character behaviour.

    For instance, Jeri’s revenge. After that scene, I was left thinking, “That’s so Jeri. Anything else wouldn’t be quite right.” And then there were all the things characters did that were detrimental to either themselves, their stated goals, or other characters. That’s a dose of truth in television. I mean, who would have thought that psychologically damaged people wouldn’t make totally rational decisions, right?

    I could have done without the virtue signalling in the marketing, though. (Look at us! All our episodes were directed by women! As if that has some magical impact on the end product. It just freaking doesn’t matter. It was either directed competently or it wasn’t. Who was doing it doesn’t matter.)

    • I think it’s good that I don’t see a lot of the marketing unless I go find it myself. I didn’t even know that every episode was directed by a woman until I read your post.

      • I don’t usually go looking for marketing stuff, either. This tidbit happened to cross my Twitter feed or pop up somewhere on Youtube or something, and then I kept seeing it everywhere.

        • Competently or not competently, sure. But you see no relevance to having a show focussed on a female protagonist having a bias towards using females writers and directors? This isn’t *at all* relevant in your estimation? It’s merely “virtue signalling?”

          • Yes, competency is the critical thing. They could have hired a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri as long as the work was done competently.

            By the way, it isn’t that they had all female writers and directors that was virtue signalling. After all, you hire people that share your creative vision when you’re making art (at least if you’re smart). It was the fact that they felt they had to point it out. *That* is the virtue signalling.

            • I’m not trying to troll here. I’m trying to figure out the thinking. I’m a huge fan of the show’s first season. I saw one article, months ago, addressing the gender/director aspect, which, frankly, made sense, given how often genre shows in the past have shortchanged female characters. Then I heard nothing about it. I’m not certain how big a deal they made it, but I hadn’t heard anything beyond that one article, until now.

              How is their pointing out this choice any more a “virtue signal” than your discussing it in a critical way? No one else here mentioned it before you did. In both cases, someone is positioning themselves politically over a fact related to the show’s creative process.

              It’s relevant in 2018 that Black Panther has an African-American director/writers, and it’s relevant that this show has female input in its creative end. Even a show as supposedly “female” as Sex and the City had incidents because the cast objected to and demanded changes to script elements they felt the (mostly) male writers got horribly wrong. I don’t mean to say it necessarily has to be this way, but I don’t begrudge JJ pointing out that they’ve taken certain steps with this season’s creative team.

              I really would like to see a world where these matters have less relevance, but we don’t live in it. Mind you, I also would like to see a small furry creature from the Centauri system direct a show about humans, if only to see what it would look like.

              I think it might provide real insight.

              And I’ll bet marketing would have a field day with the fact.

              • My experience was that the “all female” angle was much, much more in your face. For a while, it popped up everywhere (and I wasn’t looking for anything about JJ at all). Maybe the producers weren’t virtue signalling and it was just a couple of factual “we did this” things that got out of hand somehow, but it sure came across as virtual signalling given how much of it I kept seeing. This could easily be targeted marketing gone awry, or it may have been more prominent in my experience due to other factors. Perhaps my “browsing profile” overlaps just enough with the demographic that cares about that sort of thing.

                And, yes, I do recognize that the world we live in is one in which this type of marketing material works. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

                Either way, it had no impact on whether I was going to watch.

                And it certainly had no impact on the quality of the resulting product, which is excellent in my opinion. (The apparent virtue signalling bit, that is. I have no doubt the specific talent they hired did have an impact and presumably that’s why said talent was hired.)

  2. I really, really hate Trish. My low-point is that she didn’t get some weird mutation that makes her like have lizard skin or something. Because she friggin deserves it.

    One other problem I had was Alisa. Her actions and motivations were all over the place and inconsistent enough that she was basically a walking plot-hole.

    Overall I did enjoy this season – but it was no Season 1.

    • I thought Alisa was pretty straight forward and consistent. She loved Dr. Malus, she loved Jessica, and she believed she know what was best for Jessica. As for the rest of humanity, they are all lesser species that were just there to get in her way. She was better and could just go what she wanted to them and their stuff, but you didn’t want to agitate them too much or they’d swarm.

    • Trish is an established character in the comic book canon, so the end of her story arc was predictable. I was hoping for it, in fact, but then watching it play out felt like a ”be careful what you wish for” situation, as it was an ugly path to follow. Character consistent, engaging, and plausible, but ugly.

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